In an interview with author Kevin Brownlow, Buster Keaton said that he directed almost all of this film and that credited co-director James W. Horne did virtually none of it. Keaton said that his business manager talked him into using Horne, but that Horne proved "absolutely worthless to me... I don't know why we had him."
The boat for which Buster Keaton is coxswain is called Damfino, the same name as the eponymous boat in his short movie The Boat.
The pole vault near the end of the movie is one of the few stunts in his career that Buster Keaton did not perform himself.
Various sources associated with the production recalled in later interviews that there was also a filmed scene of Buster Keaton's character trying to play football, but that this scene was later removed to avoid too close a comparison with Harold Lloyd's The Freshman. While no film has surfaced to confirm this, two small parts of the released film lend credence it: 1) When Keaton is unpacking in his dorm, one of the how-to-play-sports books he unpacks is about football, and 2) in the scene of Keaton running across the campus to rescue his girl, he dodges through a crowd of people like a running back trying to avoid tacklers in the open field.